Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy by Zillah Eisenstein

Author:Zillah Eisenstein [Eisenstein, Zillah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Economy, General
ISBN: 9780814722053
Google: 1GkVCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 1998-10-15T09:38:00+00:00

Global Capital and Racialized Patriarchy

Capital, being transient and fluid, needs the nation-state to embrace new transnational trade agreements and policies. “The meaningful divide is not geography—it is class.”25 And the first-world formula utilizes established racialized/patriarchal relations, once effectively located in the western traditional nuclear family and the social welfare state, but now constructed in transnationalized consumerist and multicultural fashion. The new relationships between global capital and privatized states thread corporate excess through the processes of downsizing, structural adjustment, and new formulations of racialized patriarchy.

Said another way, global capital emasculates first-world nation-states as protectors of the economic nation and refocuses them to its economic transnation status. The nation-state is thus a major player in the process of globalizing capital while giving new license to its racial/sexual formation. The nation-state must now nurture the cyber-media complex of transnational capital, while also appearing to meet the needs of its national constituencies. Government officials are caught between a ‘rock and a hard place’ today. No wonder presidents look so inept.

In this process, aspects of statist patriarchy—the privileging of men in and through the political/public sphere in distinction from the private sphere of womanhood in the home/family/domestic sphere—are transferred to the transnational gendered division of labor in the information age.26 Women’s exploitation is rewired at computer terminals throughout countries of the south while using more differentiated and varied sites in the north.

Women’s/girls’ secondary status defines their particularly proletarian role across the globe. But now the privatized nation-state plays a more circuitous role in enforcing this gendered hierarchy. The location of power has been dispersed to multiple sites in the transnational economy, and to the single-parent family headed by women. The first-world nation-state regulates less paternalistically in its diminished social welfare role. Instead, privatized sites like the single-parent family and the market itself economically discipline women/girls.

Global patriarchy is sustained less directly through the privatized nation-state than through the numbing inequalities of the market. As a result, public responsibility has diminished and public life has been privatized. Meanwhile ‘the’ private sphere of family and personal life has been publicized by endless sex scandal, talk-show confessionals, and exposure of domestic violence. Public/private boundaries appear fluid as the personal has been politicized and politics has been personalized. Patriarchal privilege, like capital itself, is flexible and mobile.

As the partial autonomy of first-world economic nations declines in relation to global capital,27 the public/private divide no longer substantiates patriarchal privilege as it once did. The newly repositioned economic nation defers to the globe’s new boundaries, which unsettle and undermine the traditionally patriarchal familial/public divide. So a few upper-middle-class women fill managerial and government jobs—which have less power than they once did. They manage the public household while men remain the CEOs at the top of the cyber-media transnational complex.

The town in which I live for the first time has a woman superintendent of the local schools, even though the public schools have always been a big employer of women at the lower ranks. The college I teach at has its first woman president, acting provost, and sports director.

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